Re: how many games do you hear an opponent say

Quote
stlramz
we knew everything they were doing (and it sure looked like it).

it happens occasionally, but not very often. Remember Zach Thomas's comment after the Rams slammed Miami in 2001 - "I didn't recognize a single play" or something to that effect - I recall he even asked Az Hakim at one point "how many plays do you guys have" and Az says "a lot" or something like that. not the type of stuff you hear nowadays about this offense.

It may very well be a mantra but that doesn't mean its not true.

There's a reason teams said that about the Martz Rams. (Billichick said it too). The Martz Rams did not really practice plays. They practiced combinations of routes ad then would prepare for a situation where the playcall told them what to run in terms of route combos. As a result of that they could have dozens of plays for any given game but at the same time did not run any individual play in practice more than a couple of times if that. We know all this because back when Saunders was the OC with the Chiefs, he described the offense and how they practiced and stated that in the Martz tradition they would have volume at the expense of execution.

Most teams in all NFL history did not do it that way, so you are comparing a team to a huge exception.

But the real giveaway is in your question. How many teams say that? Virtually none. In fact, tellingly, no one has said that about the Fisher Rams before. So it's hard to turn that into this overgeneral damming thing...it's only this once that we've ever heard that.

And what happened? Simple. Rams have the same defense and pretty much the same offense, and the 9ers had all off-season to study it.

Meanwhile, although there would be some general idea what a Kelly offense would do, the Rams had no tape on that offense with this personnel. And there wasn't even THAT much on the defense.

It just seems to me that the 9ers prepared all off-season for the opener and had something to go on. Rams had far less to go on.

So what REALLY happened, in my view? All the (what to me looks like) post-loss lamenting and hyperbole aside?

Rams took a half to adjust on defense, because they didn't know what they were seeing exactly, and that put the offense in the hole. That offense can help win games when the defense keeps it close, but it is NOT set up to take a game back from deep behind (mostly because that's outside Keenum's abilities). At the same time the offense was going against a defense that knew their tendencies, while they had no equivalent knowledge of that defense.

Result? IMO?

What to me looks like a thousand fan theories about what a horrible team the Rams are.

And to me it looks like that scattered throughout all that are a few decent half-truths.

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/16/2016 09:35AM by zn.